The bizarre world of the Bazaar
Book Title: The Madhouse
Author: Gyan Chaturvedi. Translated from the Hindi by Punarvasu Joshi.
The term Kafkaesque may not be indicative of his writing style, but Gyan Chaturvedi’s mastery over absurd situations is navigated much like the great early 20th century German language writer’s surrealistic predicaments. The protagonists of Kafka, a lawyer by profession, were portrayed as isolated characters facing socio-bureaucratic power in his works. Chaturvedi’s, a doctor, stand threatened en masse by market forces in his fifth novel ‘The Madhouse’, published in Hindi in 2018 under the title ‘Pagalkhana’.
Dr Chaturvedi’s medical career was spent in a Bhopal hospital run by BHEL, a public sector undertaking. His entry into the writing world in an era that was both thematically and ideologically dominated by the left-oriented doyen of Hindi satire, Hari Shankar Parsai, proved to be a bonus to Hindi literature. His was a rare approach at that time of hardcore professionalism in an almost unidimensional set-up, comprising individuals mostly from the teaching/academic world. The raw material at his command by way of day-to-day exchanges with the clients has been all too visible in the unique insight that his writings have carried all these years.
In his own words, expressed while receiving the Vyas Samman in August 2024, the present book is a dichotomous peep: “The market has understood our language better than us, read our instincts, understood the structure of our society and our human weaknesses, our love, hate, anger and arrogance; understood our sexual anxieties, our desire for domination; understood our mind that trembles at the thought of torture, and murder, and therefore, it’s not surprising that it now wants to govern us.”
The tone and scope of the ensuing conflict is set plainly in one of the early chapters of the novel: where was the government when the Bazaar was taking over everything else; why didn’t it stop this disaster from happening?
“What happened to the Constitution? What happened to the people who took an oath to protect and serve the Constitution? How come the leash which was supposed to be on the Bazaar is now seen on them? Why did this happen, when the Bazaar’s tsunami came, law, rules, civil rights, the Constitution, religion, social sciences, and every other system was swept away? People were either trying to surf these waves or they were just drowning.”
The fight is inevitable but where are the fighters, the crazies, as the writer calls them, and sets out to discover them.
Here, the novelist is on his home turf. He can pinpoint the crazies exactly from among the routine clients, face-to-face with everyday situations. A middle-aged mother with a kid in the psychiatry ward’s waiting room is in confrontation with an old woman escorting her ailing husband, who is under the illusion that their son will put his photo on OLX to sell him to the first approaching buyer.
Gyan Chaturvedi has flagged his novel as the tale of those madmen who believed there was more to life than the Bazaar. His crazies are right there to be noticed. Look at these specimens of his characters in his own words (drawn from the titles of some chapters): He was digging a tunnel to escape from a blind tunnel; He is not alone; The one who is digging the tunnel alongside; The sound of steps from under the ground; The tunnel was found and he didn’t even know; He, the one who jumped into a manhole; The man hidden behind the plank; He lost his mind, and his memories; He is at the gates, beware; He was martyred and nobody came to know; So what if he can’t see. Finally, ‘Time’, which was possessed by the Bazaar, led the rebellion to conquer the Bazaar.
Abstraction could be such an amazing way to present even a burning common theme. For instance, “The Bazaar was on the rise but unemployment was rampant.” The novel is unique in the way its text is replete with the situational expressions philosophically coined by the author. Moon becomes a shining manhole cover on the sky’s black road. The unemployed is hiding from himself in the park. If the tunnel was just somewhere in his heart and mind, then how could he have died getting crushed under it? The author has nowhere distanced himself from satire at any time or any frame throughout the book.
It will be quite in order to quote Punarvasu Joshi, who translated the novel into English so deftly, choosing to repeat the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson in ‘The American Scholar’ many decades ago: “Each age, it is found, must write its books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.”
‘The Madhouse’ is that relevant in the present context!
— The writer is a former IPS officer